Mobile shopping has been around for a long time: I remember analysts first getting excited about "m-commerce" back in the days when it was all about WAP sites.

Fast forward to 2012, and a blizzard of celebratory press released recently about rocketing use of smartphones and tablets around the Black Friday sales event, as well as bullish predictions for the Christmas season.

In the UK, Deloitte has forecasted £330m of sales directly through smartphones this Christmas, with another £500m coming from tablets, and £3.2bn of in-store sales "influenced by smartphones" as people research products and prices on their handsets.

Near enough every big retailer has an app to capitalise on this, with the more savvy companies also having slick mobile websites to capture incoming customers from search engines. Meanwhile, online services like eBay, Amazon and Fab are poised for intense pre and post Christmas usage of their apps and mobile sites.

There's another trend happening among some British retailers, too: tablet shopping as more of a browsing and editorial-based experience, rather than purely transactional.

Apps from Harrods, Debenhams and ASOS are three examples for Christmas 2012, all coming more from the contract publishing sides of these retailers.

Harrods gets playful

The Harrods Magazine iPad app digitises the print edition's features, while adding video interviews, fashion-shoot footage and interactive sections to try on virtual makeup. Originally intended for overseas customers, it's attracted 30k readers, many of them in the UK.

"It's not transactional, although it will be eventually," says Deb Bee, editor-in-chief of the magazine. "We know people want it to be transactional. But they also appreciate the fact that it's not a hard sell. We're adding value to the brand, just not in a transactional kind of way for now."

Bee notes that the makeup tester section has been a huge hit with the app's users, while the magazine's team has also put in hidden easter-egg features to raise a smile, like a cartoon mule that runs across the screen when a Mule show was tapped on.

"For the Christmas issue, we've got a feature on easy-to-make canapes, with a stop-frame animation of the ingredients to music. Eeach component dances onto the screen and makes itself into a chocolate pudding," she laughs.

Bee says the app is an extension of Harrods' real-world brand persona. "If you go to the Harrods store, they really do have opera singers singing in the halls, tastings, face painters and all that madness," she says.

"That's one reason why people come to Harrods: it's like retail theatre, and a destination in its own right. And that's what the app is doing in digital form: it's digital retail theatre."

The Debenhams for iPad app

Debenhams' tablet boom

Debenhams has a well-established mobile strategy, with apps available on iOS and Android, and 1.4m downloads across those platforms so far.

"Mobile has always been important, but for some things we're thinking mobile-first now," says Fiona Lay, head of online at Debenhams.

"Over half our emails are opened on a phone, and we're seeing a really high proportion of visits from mobile, and even more so from tablets. 20% of Debenhams customers now own an iPad, and compared to a dotcom customer, an iPad customer is worth twice as much in terms of sales."

Hence the Debenhams for iPad app, which offers full shopping features, but also editorial content, videos and a gift-finder feature in good time for Christmas.

Lay says that the retailer is expecting a big spike in traffic over Christmas, with the tablet app contributing to that. "Last year on Christmas Day, we had more than 800k visitors on our website, and a huge volume of them were mobile," she says.

"This year, we see that mix increasing. On Christmas Day, it's somehow acceptable to be sat there with your new iPad, rather than sat at a computer."

Lay also says that Debenhams also sees clear trends emerging in the times of day when each digital property sees its highest traffic, based on people's locations and moods.

"In the morning, it's definitely mobile. Between 10pm and 2pm it's dotcom, and then in the evening definitely tablet right through to very late. 10pm is becoming your peak shopping time," she says.

ASOS Fashion Up app

ASOS gets engaged

Finally, online retailer ASOS also has a mix of apps, including pure shopping, but also ASOS Fashion Up, a weekly digital magazine that offers a more editorial spin on the company's catalogue of products.

"It's more of an engagement thing than a revenue thing," says Duncan Edwards, editorial and design director at ASOS, who explains that the Fashion Up app had been downloaded 100k times by late November.

"The idea is we take the best bits of [print] ASOS magazine, and also do weekly content, using it to try to capture new customers. We've deliberately kept content and shopping separate, although we're looking at ways early next year of syncing the app with your ASOS account to easily move things into your saved-items basket."

As with Debenhams and Harrods, ASOS Fashion Up has its roots in contract publishing: it seems many of the publishers and creatives in that industry are gearing up to provide apps for their retailer clients – when it's not handled in-house – that often sit separately to their main e-commerce apps and sites.

For now, many of these apps are iOS-only, but the release of new tablets from Amazon and Google will change that in 2013, with strong UK sales of the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7/10 devices expected this Christmas.

Edwards says that ASOS is looking at doing an Android tablet app early next year, with Android smartphones likely following. Debenhams already has an Android app, but Bee says the company is "obviously thinking about the other things that are coming, like the Kindle Fire and Nexus, as well as Windows 8".

Edwards also talks about the likelihood of this more-browsable approach to mobile/tablet shopping going beyond the native app stores in the not-too-distant future.

"Mobile internet technology is getting so much better, I can almost see a position where you might not need to do an app: the sensible thing might be just to have an amazing mobile website," he says.